A 2019 New York Times article proposes that John Grisham's success, and the subsequent success of the film adaptations of his best-selling novels, parallel the rise of a "New South," one that promotes progressive virtues and a critical consciousness of the troubling history of the American South, which is still, to this day, haunted by a legacy of racist violence, white supremacy, and slavery. Noel Murray writes, "In 1993, the country had just put the former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton in the White House, with the former Tennessee senator Al Gore as his vice president. The Atlanta hip-hop acts TLC, Kriss Kross and Arrested Development were all over the Billboard charts. The sitcom “Designing Women,” set in Georgia, was a staple in the Nielsen Top 10. And masses of readers were buying the legal thrillers written by the Mississippi lawyer John Grisham." Murray proposes that this laundry list of political and cultural benchmarks of Southern representation indicates that the compass of mainstream national interest in the early- to-mid-'90s was gradually pointing southward. Murray goes on to write that "judging by his books (and their movie adaptations), Grisham—like Clinton and Gore—seemed to believe in a newer, more middle-of-the-road kind of Southern leadership, which balanced progressive attitudes about social justice with more regressive ideas about reducing crime and maintaining order."
Grisham's novels are an artifact of what it meant to be white and "progressive" in the South merely thirty years ago. But in the light of the present, the novels fall far short of progressivism, especially in terms of representation. Grisham admits in interviews that he wrote the novels as a way of exploring a personal fantasy. He imagined himself, at the time of writing, in the role of Jake Brigance, which tells the reader quite a lot about John Grisham's perspective. The engine of the novel is not necessarily seeking justice for Tonya, whose brutal rape serves as the inciting incident for the rest of the story; the engine is Jake Brigance attempting to balance his aspirations as a defense lawyer extraordinaire with his perfect family life and his lustful attraction to his law clerk. Aside from screaming out for her father, Tonya Hailey barely says a word throughout the entire novel. Instead, a scene of ultraviolence plays out at her expense, and the protagonist seizes upon the defense of her father's murder trial as an opportunity for personal gain. The series is aptly called "The Jake Brigance Book Series"—and it's clear whose perspective is championed throughout. There is nothing wrong with writing autobiographical fiction, but the notion that this legal thriller marks a step forward in reckoning with the American South's brutal past seems to ignore the problems with the novel itself, including the frequent and unreflective use of racial slurs without any significant attempt to reckon with their use by white characters, even those whites that the book labels "progressives."
The critic Andrew Taylor calls violence against women in thriller novels as "a sort of literary monosodium glutamate: ie, as a gratuitous and fundamentally nasty flavour enhancer lacking moral or artistic purpose." Val McDermid, responding to the same Staunch literary prize which awards crime literature that does not include an act of violence against women, says, "My take on writing about violence against women is that it’s my anger at that very thing that fires much of my work. As long as men commit appalling acts of misogyny and violence against women, I will write about it so that it does not go unnoticed." While Grisham's disdain for Cobb and Willard is clear, his novel focuses more on the male fantasy of avenging a daughter's brutal rape than the fallout of the rape for Tonya. The central question of the novel becomes, "What would you do if your daughter was raped," and is asked primarily of men by other men. Most of these men respond by saying that they would kill the rapists, or hope that they would have the courage to do what Carl Lee does. In this way, the violence against Tonya in the first chapter of the novel serves as the material for a revenge fantasy, which seems closer to the cheap thrills of monosodium glutamate than a righteous, critical, feminist fire.
